This bill adds a new section to chapter 71A.12 RCW and amends multiple existing statutes to require the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) to contract directly with providers for “community inclusion services” under home and community-based waivers and to establish service and contract standards. The new standards require community inclusion services to include incidental personal care as needed, allow group-based services (provider-client ratios may not be limited to one-to-one), limit billing to direct client services except for reasonable transportation fees and up to 15 minutes per week per client for recordkeeping/administration, and require that assessed community inclusion service hours not be reduced when those services are folded into aggregate services subject to a dollar limit. The bill also amends statutes to permit the secretary (and by rule counties and developmental disability boards) to enter into contracts or provide services as authorized, except for operating residential habilitation centers, and requires the administration to promulgate rules by June 30, 2025 to define developmental disability without using IQ scores. The bill changes procedural rules for client choice: clients age 21 and older who are enrolled in employment services must be offered the option to transition to community inclusion after nine months in an employment program and may transition from community inclusion to employment at any time; prior departmental approval is not required to effectuate the client’s choice once nine months of participation is verified, and the department must inform clients and legal representatives of options and adopt rules allowing exceptions to the nine-month requirement. The act also amends long-term care worker certification rules to exempt various family-member and limited-hour individual providers from certain training requirements, including providers caring only for specified relatives, individual providers who provide 20 hours or less of nonrespite care for one person in a month, those who provide under 300 hours of respite services in a year, certain spouse or domestic partner providers funded through specific programs, and workers providing only the community inclusion services described in section 1; the department is directed to adopt implementing rules. These changes create a new statutory section and modify existing laws to impose new contracting, billing, service standard, and client-choice procedures and to create training-exemption rules for certain long-term care workers. No new crimes or penalty changes are specified in the provided text. The provided excerpts end mid-clause in RCW 18.88B.041 and repeatedly reference “as provided in section 1 of this act”; the remainder of that subsection and any additional cross-references or implementation details are not included here.

If enacted, the bill will shift how community inclusion services are run and paid: the Department of Social and Health Services will contract directly with service providers, allow those providers to deliver group-based services that include incidental personal care, and limit what can be billed to direct client time (with only transportation fees and up to 15 minutes per client per week for paperwork allowed). Clients 21 and older who have been in employment programs for nine months will be told they can move into community inclusion services without prior department approval, and may return to employment services at any time; counties and developmental disability boards can also be authorized to provide many services the department now provides, increasing local options and responsibilities. The likely effects are more flexibility for providers to run group activities and potentially lower per-client delivery costs, while administrative billing revenue is tightly limited so providers may need to absorb most documentation time; clients gain clearer, quicker options to switch between employment and community inclusion services. Training requirements will be reduced for many family caregivers and some individual providers (including those who only provide community inclusion services), lowering their training costs, but the department must adopt rules and several implementation details are missing or incomplete in the text provided (including the remainder of one exemption subsection and how the new contracting rules interact with other funding limits), so the timing and precise financial impacts remain uncertain.